Article · October 010 citations 45 reads 2,332 author

7.
 
A Focus on the Native Listener 
In a utopian world, at least an ESL, immigrant–receiving world, we would put more emphasis on 
helping native speakers to understand accented English. It is ironic that we expect L2 learners 
from many linguistic backgrounds to understand each other, as well as a full range of English 
dialects, while at the same time, some native speakers make no adjustments for their L2 
interlocutors.
A study of major impact in this area is that of Rubin (1992), who had two classes of psychology 
students listen to a mini-lecture recorded by a woman whose own dialect of American English 
was the same as that of the undergraduate students. However, in one class the students were 
shown a photo of a Chinese woman and were told that she was the lecturer, and in the other 
class, the listeners saw a picture of a Caucasian woman. The students in the class who saw the 
Chinese photo actually understood less of the lecture than the students who saw the Caucasian 

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Utopian Goals | 31 
Selected Papers from the 1
st
Annual Conference on Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and 
Teaching 
woman, and they complained about her accent! Yet the researcher had used the same recording 
in both classes. This tells us that expectations can have a major impact on listeners.
There are people in this world who are biased against immigrants, biased against people of 
another race, biased against accents and essentially biased against difference of all types. There 
is probably not much one can do about those individuals, but there are also many people who are 
not anti-immigrant and not racist, but who are afraid to talk to L2 speakers because they don‘t 
think they have the skills to understand accented speech. In a study that my colleagues and I 
conducted (Derwing, Rossiter & Munro, 2002), we trained social work students to listen more 
carefully to L2 speech. The participants changed their attitudes towards their own ability to 
understand accents. By the end of a term, several reported a willingness to interact with L2 
speakers that they hadn‘t felt before, and they also indicated having experienced success in real 
life encounters, which they attributed to the training.
In a more recent study, Kang, Rubin and Pickering (2008) designed an intervention in which 
university students met with international teaching assistants to do a puzzle together and share a 
pizza. Members of this group were more empathetic towards the teaching assistants after this 
intervention. 
So what can native speakers do to improve communication with a nonnative speaker? Not only 
can they make more efforts to listen to accented speech, but they can follow the suggestions from 
the Københavns Sprogcenter, Dansk for Udlaendinge (Danish for foreigners). The Sprogcenter 
produced posters that are distributed to workplaces all over Denmark, with the following 10 tips 
for encouraging successful interaction of native speakers with nonnative speakers:
1. Imagine what it‘s like to be in your colleague‘s shoes. 
2. Involve your colleague in conversation. 
3. Take time to listen. 
4. Look at the person you‘re speaking to. 
5. Say it in a different way if you are not understood. 
6. Helping find the missing words. 
7. Speak straightforwardly (e.g., don‘t use much slang). 
8. Speak in a suitable tempo. 
9. Don‘t mumble. 
10. Give only a few instructions at a time.